Chapter 2

And yet, if one turns from it to examine that organization of human labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great fissures that rend the whole mass and one hears the foundations groan. To speak thus is only an imaginative way of saying, what all the anthropologists and archaeologists tell us, that to the building of any one of the great pyramids went the enforced labor of upwards of a million men for many years, who were literally driven by the lash of the whip. There is no ground for supposing that the feel of the whip, when the back of an Egyptian slave began to bleed, was different from what we should suffer if the stroke fell now on us: nor that cries of pain were any the less natural then. And we must remember that, according to the unanimous opinion of anthropologists, the organization of enforced labor is one of the essentials of civilization. Picturesque and vivid, but not exaggerated, is the saying of the author of that able book, _The Nemesis of Nations_: "Civilization begins with the crack of the whip." Lord Cromer quotes this dictum in his work on Egypt as giving an epitome of the kind of power behind the civilizing process as it has always manifested itself in the land of the Nile; and then, lest those of his readers who live in the glass house of English history should commit the ridiculous sin of unconscious hypocrisy, he gently but firmly reminds us that many inhumanities of a similar spirit, especially towards offenders against the laws of property, were not suppressed in England till the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In these comments of mine upon Egypt, I may seem to have appealed to your sentiment of humanity; but I have never for a moment forgotten that no instance from history can prove civilization a disease except to those who are intuitively on the side of the man instead of the microbe, of the people instead of the pyramid. Such instances, however, are of value in bringing those who listen to them to a clear self-consciousness of their own primal preference--and that is a distinct gain, even when the preference is for the pyramid.

It cannot be denied that the masses of Egypt were a sacrifice--and not willingly--to civilization. In the preceding periods of savagery and barbarism, there had been no such enslavement; the organization of enforced labor had not proceeded so far. The crack of the whip was still as yet intermittent. According to Lewis Morgan, civilization is the progress of man from beast to citizen. Well, until ten thousand years ago, man was more beast than citizen; but, happily for him, among the beasts of the field there is nothing parallel to this organization of labor through the will of one by means of the stroke of the courbash upon the backs of the many.

Some students who shrink in horror from the Egyptian type of civilization plead nevertheless for the type which was manifested in ancient Greece. Let us go, then, to Athens in the age of Pericles, that period of her glory concerning which Professor Freeman somewhere says that to have lived but ten years in the midst of it would have been worth a hundred of modern mediocrity. Who can think otherwise as he recalls the Athenian drama, eloquence and philosophy, architecture and sculpture? But when one turns to the organization of society, as it was in Athens, to find out at what human price the splendor was bought of that dazzling decade when the Parthenon was being built, one finds that of the inhabitants of that City of the Light scarcely more than thirty thousand were free men, while two hundred thousand were slaves. Again, the living foundations groan! And if our heart, by its nature, insists on going out to the sacrificed, our delight in Athenian _Kultur_ will be henceforth shot through with anguish. Our only way of escape will be by absorbing Nietzsche into our system until the poison paralyzes our impulse to pity. But you may think that if we shift our investigation, we shall find relief. Let us enquire, then, into the position of woman instead of the man-slave in Athens. Alas! we are now confronted with facts which reveal, on the part of one whole half of Greek mankind, the surrender of their distinctive humanity to civilization, to that process whereby sentient beings are transformed from beasts into citizens. Professor Westermarck sums up the attitude of civilization to women in these terms:--

Nowhere else has the difference in culture between men and women been so immense as in the fully-developed Greek civilization. The lot of a wife in Greece was retirement and ignorance. She lived in almost absolute seclusion, in a separate part of the house, together with her female slaves, deprived of all the educating influence of male society, and having no place at those public spectacles which were the chief means of culture.

He then calls attention to the startling absence from the whole of Greek literature of any evidence that any man who had received the training which Greek culture gave ever fell in love with any woman. In his chapter on the "Subjection of Wives," Professor Westermarck further says:--

The status of wives is in various respects connected with the ideas held about the female sex in general. Woman is commonly looked upon as a slight, dainty, and relatively weak creature, destitute of all nobler qualities. Especially among nations more advanced in culture she is regarded as intellectually and morally inferior to man. In Greece, in the historic age, the latter recognized in her no other end than to minister to his pleasure and to become the mother of his children.

This author finds the Greek subjection of wives, as you will have noted, no exception to the universal rule as to the relation of culture to womanhood. After speaking of the status of woman among the ancient Hebrews, and the position assigned her by that greatest instrument of European civilization called the Roman Catholic Church, he repeats his generalization in these terms:--

Progress in civilization has exercised an unfavorable influence on the position of woman by widening the gulf between the sexes, as the higher culture was almost exclusively the prerogative of the men. Moreover, religion, and especially the great religions of the world, has contributed to the degradation of the female sex by regarding woman as unclean.

IX. THE AGE OF THE FOUNDATIONS AT HAND

Is this degradation an inevitable outcome of the animating principle at the heart of the process whereby sentient beings have thus far been transformed from beasts into citizens? We are forced to answer "Yes." Otherwise, why has the relative degradation of woman deepened universally with the progress of civilization? If Westermarck is right, it would seem that the lowest foundations of highly developed society have always consisted of the bodies and souls of women. If such be the historic fact, it may seem strange that only in our day, but now the world over, is heard the wail of women crying to be freed. Perhaps the reason, however, that we for the first time hear the wail is because never before had the fissures grown wide enough to allow the fainter, but more piteous, sighs to escape.

The fact, too, of which there is no doubt, that at last in our age even women are beginning to be revered as responsible moral and spiritual agents may be a sign that the Day of the Foundations is come, that the age of civilization is nearing its close, and that a new era, animated by a fresh principle of human co-ordination, is at hand. There is at least evidence that many women are asking: "Are the products of civilization worth the price which we women have been compelled to pay, in order that they may exist? Is our subjection justifiable?" In reply, the men who entertain an innate contempt for woman answer, "Yes"; those who are moved by the extreme opposite of sentiment have arrived at the bitter, though chivalrous, thought, "Better the non-existence of the human race than the continued sacrifice of its womankind"; while even the sons of the golden mean in judgment go so far as to say that not only the already acquired benefits of civilization, but finer ones and more abundant, can from now on be attained by some other process, which will involve no degradation either to workingman or to woman, and which in structural principle and human effects will differ as much from civilization as civilization itself differed from the barbarism and savagery which preceded it.

My own judgment is, that civilization is nearing its close. Four or five deadly blows were dealt out to it by four or five events which happened in the middle of the fifteenth century after Christ, and it has been staggering ever since. In that century, certain things occurred which produced the very opposite effect upon the masses of mankind to that produced by the wonderful thing which had happened ten thousand years ago and by its occurrence had changed radically the relation of men and women to the community and to the physical universe in which they lived. What was begun in the fifteenth century by the events that took place then, and what was continued as a destructive process until recently, is, in my judgment, being finished now through a constructive process which has been set up by certain other things--some ten or twenty--which have happened since the beginning of the present century.

X. A NEW STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLE

It has seemed to me necessary at this point in my argument to call attention to the introduction into social life in the fifteenth century of a new working principle which has been in direct antagonism to the basic idea of civilization, because it must be borne in mind that during the last four centuries the history of Europe and the New World furnishes illustrations of two conflicting processes of social integration. Not everything that has happened since the New World was discovered can be set down to the credit of that process which is still ascendant in Prussia. Instances, therefore, from modern history which go against my account of civilization have no weight against my contention and cannot be raised against me; modern instances must not only be shown to be facts, but to be vital outputs of the same principle that animates the old order. To account every co-ordination of modern social life as an instance of civilization is as if any one should cite the turbine engine and its achievements and set these down to the credit of the piston engine. But the idea of the one is wholly new and not a further evolution of the old. Or it is as if one should assign the glory of the motor-car to the inventor of the bicycle, or of the bicycle to the originator of the horse-cart; or as if one should point to an aeroplane as an illustration of a further stage in the evolution of the motor-car. It is a fact that the aeroplane came after, but not a fact that it came _from_, the motor-car. If, as I believe, the new order which began to manifest itself in the fifteenth century stands to civilization as the aeroplane to the motorcar, and as the motor-car to the bicycle and the horse-cart, or as the turbine to the piston engine, then I am right in claiming that we ought not to call it civilization. If we do, we should be acting like any one who insisted upon calling an airship a horse-cart. There might be reasons for so doing: and there may be reasons for calling things civilization which are something quite different. For instance, I can conceive that the new order might be more easily insinuated into general acceptance if those whose interests are all vested in the old are not informed that it is new. But tonight I am treating not of words, but of things; and if it will hasten the triumph of the new order to pretend that it is civilization, let us by all means do so--just as we call six o'clock seven in order to gain an extra hour of sunlight during the waking day.

I know that to many the idea will appear grotesquely naive, that an institution as old as civilization and so wide-spreading should come to an end and be superseded by something else, and that this change should be taking place under our very eyes. But, happily for me, the world-conflict which is now devastating Europe has begun to undermine in the soul of many the fetish-worship of civilization. And to assist further in breaking the spell which civilization may have cast over the imagination of most of my audience, I would remind you that civilization is, after all, a mere mushroom growth, and that what has sprung up only overnight cannot have taken deep root (as if it were a thing practically eternal), and could not be very difficult to replace by something more deliberately thought out--by something learned through ten thousand years of the tragic effects experienced by thousands of millions of human beings. Civilization, I say, is a mere mushroom growth, as compared with the whole life-period of man's existence on earth. It is only ten thousand years old; while, by the most modest and cautious calculation, man has existed one hundred thousand years; and during the ninety thousand which preceded the last ten, he made gigantic progress towards self-knowledge and self-reverence. Let us, therefore, not be browbeaten by civilization on account of its antiquity.

XI. EDWARD CARPENTER'S INDICTMENT OF CIVILIZATION

Equally must we guard against the fallacy of attributing only the beneficent effects of civilization to its inherent principle, while we trace all the evils which have arisen in its train to extrinsic causes--to human nature, or to superficial and local obstructions. This word of warning brings me back to Mr. Edward Carpenter's essay on _Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_; for when I first read it he appeared to me to exaggerate out of all proportion the evils in modern life as compared with the good in it: especially did I feel that he erred in that he accounted the evils as permanent and organic characteristics of the civilizing process itself, and believed that they must increase with its development and could not be eradicated except with its extinction. During the last twenty-six years, however, I have learned a thing or two. I have not lost one jot or tittle of my early faith in man, and I have even gained fresh hope for a speedy issue of the human race out of most of its sufferings and sins; but I have gained this fresh hope only because I have been drawn by wider and closer observation of economic events--and especially of the new developments of trade and politics the world over--to the conclusion that the evils, however great, are to be traced to the false principle that animates the civilizing process, and that they will fall away of themselves when once that principle has been exchanged for another that is already well known, and which, as I have remarked, began four centuries ago to disintegrate the established order.

Carpenter's indictment of civilization seems to me incontrovertible. The best way for me to present it briefly will be by means of a number of typical quotations, in which he indicates the nature of disease and shows that such is the state--mental, physical, social, and moral--induced in man by the organization of enforced labor and the whole of the adopted method of making citizens out of wild beasts:--

When we come to analyze the conception of disease, physical or mental, in society or the individual, it evidently means ... loss of unity. Health, therefore, should mean unity. ... The idea should be a positive one--a condition of the body in which it is an entirety, a unity, a central force maintaining that condition; and disease being the break-up--or break-down--of that entirety into multiplicity.... Thus in a body, the establishment of an insubordinate centre--a boil, a tumor, the introduction and spread of a germ with innumerable progeny throughout the system, the enlargement out of all reason of an existing organ--means disease. In the mind, disease begins when any passion asserts itself as an independent centre of thought and action.... What is a taint in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human system. The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct threats, menaces made against the central authority--against the Man himself. For the man must rule, or disappear; it is impossible to imagine a man presided over by a Stomach--a walking Stomach, using hands, feet, and all the other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve its assimilative mania. So of the Brain, or any other organ; for the Man is no organ, resides in no organ, but is the central life ruling and radiating among all organs, and assigning them their parts to play. Disease, then, in mind or body, is ... the abeyance of a central power and the growth of insubordinate centres--life in each creature being conceived of as a continual exercise of energy or conquest, by which external or antagonistic forces (or organisms) are brought into subjection and compelled into the service of the creature, or are thrown off as harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we find that plants or animals, when in good health, have a remarkable power of throwing off the attacks of any parasites which incline to infest them; while those that are weakly are very soon eaten up by the same. A rose-tree, for instance, brought indoors, will soon fall a prey to the aphis, though when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to no impression on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in the field are weakly from want of water, the entire crop is sometimes destroyed by the turnip-fly, which then multiplies enormously; but if a shower or two of rain comes before much damage is done, the plant will then grow vigorously, its tissues become more robust and resist the attacks of the fly, which in its turn dies. Late investigations seem to show that one of the functions of the white corpuscles of the blood is to devour disease-germs and bacteria present in the circulation,--thus absorbing these organisms into subjection to the central life of the body,--and that for this object they congregate in numbers toward any part of the body which is wounded or diseased.

XII. CARPENTER'S FALSE REMEDY

To cast Carpenter's metaphor, according to which civilization is a thing to be cured, into the form of an analogy, we might say that the civilizing process has been to man what the bringing indoors is to a rose-tree, or the coming of a drought to the turnips in a field. And I ask you to assume with me that this is so; as it will help me to get on with my argument, which, as it advances, will reveal more and more whether it be inherently weak or strong. Nor do I anticipate much opposition to Carpenter's mere indictment of civilization. At least it is only when he outlines his remedy that my own protest is aroused. And I suspect that many a reader will feel with me, that while to cure a rose-tree or a turnip plant may require only the taking of the one out of doors again and the falling of the kindly showers upon the other, the restoration of civilized man to health would necessitate something more than a mere return on his part to Nature and savagery. Indeed, such a return may be altogether impossible, and even undesirable. In my judgment, man having (as Carpenter himself points out) become "self-conscious," can never go back to Nature, since he is no longer the same being he was when he emerged from his more primitive state. Yet what Carpenter recommends so far as he recommends any cure, is exactly this: Human beings are to wear less clothes--if any at all; man will again live out of doors, for the most part, instead of in houses; he will return to the eating of uncooked food--mainly fruit and grains; he will begin to feel himself one again with Nature; he is to lose his sense of sin; every man will do the work he likes--and presumably not do the work he does not like. "As to External Government and Law, they will disappear," says Carpenter, "for they are only the travesties and transitory substitutes of Inward Government and Order." In religion, there is to be a like return to Nature. The author says:--

And when the civilization-period has passed away, the old Nature-religion--perhaps greatly grown--will come back.... Our Christian ceremonial is saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols; and long before Christianity existed, the sexual and astronomical were the main forms of religion.... On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars....

Carpenter sees signs already here and there of the beginning of this return:--

The present competitive society is more and more rapidly becoming a mere dead formula and husk within which the outlines of the new and _human_ society are already discernible. Simultaneously, and as if to match this growth, a move toward Nature and Savagery is for the first time taking place from within, instead of being forced upon Society from without. The Nature-movement, begun years ago in Literature and Art, is now among the more advanced sections of the civilized world rapidly realizing itself in actual life, going so far even as a denial, among some, of machinery and the complex products of Civilization, and developing among others into a gospel of salvation by sandals and sunbaths!

In order to help us to judge aright whether a return to Nature and a primitive communism would restore to man that centrality and health of which we assume that civilization has deprived him, we should do well to consider what it was that happened ten thousand years ago and proved so sinister in changing the relation of men and women to the community in which they lived, and to the physical universe. But of that event we cannot gain an adequate appreciation unless we view it in perspective along the line of analogous events, some six, which had occurred from time to time during the ninety thousand years preceding.

XIII. SPEECH AND FIRE